Covering the issue of climate change is not always talking about what we as humans can do to save the planet. For many people in the Global South, it is about climate injustice – how the marginalized become the most affected people by climate crisis, yet they contribute to so much less emission compared to the people in the North / Western countries. Adding the concept of Anthropocene to that shows a larger problem of inequality. Applying postcolonialism perspective towards environmental issue means questioning the idea that the knowledge that Western countries produced are the absolute truth. This thesis builds on case studies of organizations in Jakarta and Bali and their grassroot approach, from experience and challenges to be in their line of work, to listen to the voice of the practitioners as it shapes the field of communication for development and social change. Postcolonial critique concepts from McEwan (2018) are used to analyze the practices of environmental communication towards their target and the public, but also to highlight structural and external challenges that they may face in doing their work. Result of the interviews identified the notions of 1) Indonesian postcolonial identity, 2) Neoliberalism tendency, 3) Power relations, 4) Knowledge produced in the ‘West’, and 5) Non-inclusive development practices / Representation issue. This thesis highlights several identified challenges, from how certain local and cultural practices are sometimes overlooked within sustainable development practices, how foreign concepts and the use of English poses problems within the communication process, international project-based development approach presented problems for the local environmental organization, and how the slogan ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ that are popular within environmental discourses should be rethought to shift the paradigm that global environmental issues are not as global as certain people might think.

No description available.

Can the relationship White people have with the figure of the dog, in what currently exists as South Africa, be free of antiblackness? Following instances where I saw black women who worked as domestic workers walk dogs belonging to their White employers, I write these letters addressed to you, my sister, Palesa – meditating on the dog-Human relationships as sites of racial violence. The core analytic framework and theory I employ to explore these extreme, mundane, and in-between forms of violence, is Afro-Pessimism.

In recent years, there has been a pronounced (re-)turn to questions of ontology, matter, and realism in the humanities and social sciences. What all these theoretical formations have in common is their profound challenge to human exceptionalism. Taken together, these approaches have productively been described as constituting a “nonhuman turn.” This article is a theoretical exploration of the relationship between the intellectual and political practice of Cultural Studies on the one hand and the nonhuman turn on the other. For this purpose, it brings both “into encounter” (Donna Haraway), investigating points of affinity, tension, and compatibility. The essay argues that such a theoretical encounter could prove to be tremendously fruitful, both intellectually and politically, and that Cultural Studies should thus take a genuine interest in these new approaches, engage with them, put them to the test, and, when needed, “translate” and “re-articulate” them. The result could be a Cultural Studies for the Anthropocene which would have a lot to contribute to the critical (cultural/political/social/economic) struggles being fought today.

Notre thèse s’intéresse à des pratiques expérimentales et contemporaines du cinéma qui explorent la matière de l’image cinématographique (argentique ou numérique) via des altérations visuelles. Les œuvres sélectionnées supposent un travail de captation, d’enregistrement d’espaces naturels, produit en amont de l’expérimentation matérielle. Les textures et les effets visuels représentent le point de départ de nos analyses filmiques ainsi que de nos recherches théoriques, dont l’altération représente le cœur battant. Nous réfléchissons un ensemble d’œuvres matérialistes de nature, exprimant la nature par l’intermédiaire de la matière cinématographique, en leur adressant la question suivante : comment le cinéma se ferait-il l’expression écocentrique de la nature ? En replaçant ces œuvres dans notre contexte environnemental, nous questionnons aussi l’engagement écologique qu’elles suscitent : que peut exprimer le cinéma de notre nature anthropocène ? Comment adresse-t-il ces enjeux naturels, environnementaux ? Réciproquement, nous interrogeons aussi l’influence des espaces naturels filmés dans cette expression : comment leurs caractéristiques esthétiques, leur topographie, leur état actuel, conditionnent-ils cette expressivité cinématographique ? À ces questions, le postulat tenu est le suivant : les altérations visuelles de l’image en mouvement développent une expression plus directe de la nature, une mise en présence. L’expérimentation altérante de certaines caractéristiques du cinéma (mouvement, couleur, durée) accorde cette expression médiale sensorielle à la nature filmée qui propose d’en faire l’expérience, de façon sensible. Elle s’appuie sur la sensorialité et l’esthétique initiales de ces espaces naturels, que les artistes démultiplient à travers les altérations. Cette expression naît donc de la complémentarité entre les potentiels esthétiques des lieux naturels filmés et de ceux du cinéma. Cette expressivité de la nature se constitue selon nous à travers trois principales actions altérantes, chaque film en présentant au moins l’une d’entre elles : 1- les altérations de l’image décrivent les espaces filmés ; 2- elles composent un milieu à/dans l’image, un milieu à la fois naturel et filmique (s’appuyant sur les caractéristiques de la nature filmée et sur les possibilités du média) ; 3- elles renouvellent l’attention à la nature, en sensibilisant notamment à sa dimension anthropocène. L’altération de l’image témoigne donc de notre expérience vécue de la modification d’environnements en captant leurs transformations et en en figurant la trace visible (l’altération). Présenter, par l’image altérée, l’actualité de cette nature contemporaine soulève ainsi les enjeux complexes et pluriels du contexte qui a fait advenir cet état dégradé de la nature. L’espace de l’image travaillé par l’altération renvoie métaphoriquement à celui que nous occupons dans le monde naturel, et à la façon dont nous l’investissons (à l’altération que nous engendrons dans ces espaces). Une expression écocentrique de la nature en ressort et nous sensibilise, nous engage dans sa condition dégradée, ruinée. / Our thesis focuses on experimental and contemporary cinema practices that explore the materiality of the cinematographic image (analog or digital cinema) via visual alterations. The artworks selected presuppose an effort of capturing and recording natural spaces, produced upstream of material experimentation. Textures and visual effects are the starting point for our filmic analysis and theoretical research, of which alteration is the beating heart. We reflect on a range of materialist artworks of nature, expressing nature through the medium of cinematic material, addressing the following question to them: how can cinema become the ecocentric expression of nature? By placing these artworks in our environmental context, we also question the ecological commitment they engender: what can cinema express about our anthropocenic nature? How does it address these natural, environmental issues? Reciprocally, we also question the influence of the natural spaces filmed in this expression: how do their aesthetic characteristics, their topography, their current state, condition this cinematic expressivity? To these questions, our postulate is the following: visual alterations to the moving image develop a more direct expression of nature, a mise en présence. The altering experimentation of certain characteristics of cinema (movement, color, duration) grants this sensory medial expression to the filmed nature which offers to experience it, in a sensitive way. It draws on the initial sensoriality and aesthetics of these natural spaces, which the artists multiply through alteration. This expression is born of the complementarity between the aesthetics potentials of filmed natural sites and those of cinema. According to us, this expressiveness of nature is constituted through three main altering actions, with each film presenting at least one of them: 1- the alterations to the image describe the filmed spaces; 2- they compose a setting in/within the image, a setting that is both natural and filmic (drawing on the characteristics of the nature filmed and on the possibilities of the media); 3- they renew our attention to nature, notably by raising awareness of its anthropocenic dimension. The alteration of the image therefore bears witness to our lived experience of changing environments by capturing their transformations and representing their visible trace (alteration). Presenting the actuality of contemporary nature through altered images raises the complex and plural issues of the context that brought about this degraded state of nature. The space of the image worked by alteration metaphorically refers to the space we occupy in the natural world, and to the manner we invest it (to the alteration we generate in these spaces). An ecocentric expression of nature emerges, sensitizing us and engaging us in its degraded, ruined condition.

Yes / What is the nature and extent of engagement within peace research with the unfolding global environmental crisis, as captured in discourses about the ‘Anthropocene’(Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2017; Dalby, 2015)? Is the peace research scholarly community connecting with significant debates taking place in the earth sciences or among social and political movements? If it is, in what ways? Are concepts of violence and peace evolving in line with the major trends driving change this century, including climate change? This article seeks answers to these questions through a systematic survey and thematic analysis of publications in key peace-related journals and book series.What is the nature and extent of engagement within peace research with the unfolding global environmental crisis, as captured in discourses about the ‘Anthropocene’(Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2017; Dalby, 2015)? Is the peace research scholarly community connecting with significant debates taking place in the earth sciences or among social and political movements? If it is, in what ways? Are concepts of violence and peace evolving in line with the major trends driving change this century, including climate change? This article seeks answers to these questions through a systematic survey and thematic analysis of publications in key peace-related journals and book series.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation studies literary modernism’s philosophies of nature. It examines how historical attitudes about natural environments and climates are codified in literary texts, what values attach to them, and how relationships between humanity and nature are figured in modernist fiction. Attending less to nature itself than to concepts, ideologies, and aesthetic theories about nature, it argues that British modernism and ecology articulate shared concerns with the vitality of the earth, the shaping force of climate, and the need for new ways of understanding the natural world. Many of British modernism’s most familiar texts, by E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells, reveal a sustained preoccupation with significant concepts in environmental and intellectual history, including competition between vitalist, holist, and mechanistic philosophies and science, global industrialization by the British Empire, and the emergence of ecology as a revolutionary means of ordering the physical world. “Modernism, Ecology, and the Anthropocene” uncovers these preoccupations to illustrate how consistently literary works leverage environmental ideologies and how pervasively literature shapes cultural and even scientific attitudes toward the natural world. Through the geological concept of the Anthropocene, it brings literary history into interdisciplinary conversations that have recently emerged from the Earth sciences and are now increasingly common in the humanities, social sciences, and in wider public debates about climate change. The dissertation’s first chapter, “Connecting Earth to Empire: E. M. Forster’s Changing Climate,” argues that E.M. Forster’s fiction apprehends the global implications of local climate change at a crucial time in environmental and literary history. By relating Forster’s Howards End and A Passage to India to his 1909 story, “The Machine Stops,” it attends to the speculative aspects of Forster’s work and presents Forster as a keen observer who foresaw not only the passing of rural England and the arrival of a new urban way of life, but environmental change on a global scale. Its second chapter, “The Call of Life: James Joyce’s Vitalist Aesthetics,” explores the connotations “life” gathers in Joyce’s early fiction and proposes a new reading of his aesthetics that emphasizes its ecological implications by pairing Joyce with his contemporary “modern” vitalism and current new materialisms. The third chapter, “Make it Whole: The Ecosystems of Virginia Woolf and A.G. Tansley,” revises critical conceptions of Woolf as an ecological writer and environmental histories of early ecology by showing how Woolf’s philosophy of nature and Tansley’s ecosystem concept run parallel and represent a shared intellectual project: advocating theories of form and of perception that navigate the tension between holist and mechanistic conceptions of nature and mind. A final chapter, “Landlord of the Planet: H. G. Wells, Human Extinction, and Anthropocene Narratives,” establishes Wells as an early environmental humanist whose ecological outlook evolved with his perception of the rapidly increasing pace of climate change and its threat to the human species. By digging into a rarely-read scientific textbook he co-authored, The Science of Life, this chapter analyzes how the natural world is managed in three Wellsian utopias and traces the development of his writing in concert with ecology. / English